Resources

Families for Justice as Healing organizes to shift power and resources away from policing and incarceration and into Black and Brown communities to address systemic and racist abandonment, disinvestment, and criminalization. Residents are demanding healthcare, housing, treatment, education, arts, culture, community centers, community-led programming, and economic development through employment and cooperative business ownership. Families for Justice as Healing demands systemic change to policing in Boston, toward our long-term goal of removing police from our communities. Police are the first point of contact with the criminal legal system for our members, and the reason women and our families wind up on jail and prison bunks. While we are organizing against the most harmful policing practices and fighting to shift resources from policing into our communities – we are also doing the work to create ways of preventing, responding to, and healing from harm without police and prisons.

Allegations that police officers have committed sexual assault while on duty are shockingly prevalent and surprisingly underanalyzed. Police sexual violence (PSV) is situated at the intersection of two vital national conversations about police brutality and sexual violence and harassment. This report addresses PSV as the product of both issues and recommends systemic solutions sounding in both debates.

A resource detailing a few key facts about police response to domestic violence and highlighting defunding police as a survivor led anti-violence strategy that stops police from looting resources survivors need to prevent, avoid, escape and heal from violence – and puts more money into violence prevention and interruption, and meeting survivors’ needs.

This kit is designed to consolidate the information regarding Invest Divest strategy and resources for Louisville, Kentucky. This kit is intended to be used for the following: refer to this document for campaigning at the social media level, share this document with your base, and hold teach-ins and trainings on the uses of narrative and social media for this campaign, post directly from your own personal channels, and share to and from the partner organizations listed here.

In December 1968, 14-year old Dorothy Belle Young and her 11-year-old sister Yvonne were arrested for “using profane language at school to white boys.” While Yvonne received probation, Dorothy was detained at the Regional Youth Development Center (a juvenile jail) in Sanderville, GA. Black residents of Sylvester, GA, a town of 5,000 where the girls and their family lived, mobilized in support of Dorothy. They claimed that the sisters and their other siblings were being punished for integrating an all-white school. National Civil Rights figures also came to Dorothy’s defense including Coretta Scott King and Dr. Ralph Abernathy who traveled to Sylvester to lead protests. This publication offers a glimpse at a history of the criminalization of Black girls. It includes beautiful illustration and some activities. The publication was created with high school students in mind.

Breonna Taylor is the only Black woman killed by police whose case is familiar to most Americans. And a Newsy analysis shows even the highest-profile women’s cases receive only a small fraction of the coverage generated by police killings of men. The #SayHerName campaign aims to raise awareness of the connection between race and police violence and make sure the stories of Black women are being told.

Historically, Black women, girls, and femmes have not fit the most accessible frames of anti-Black police violence. Consequently, it is difficult to tell stories about their lost lives that people recognize and remember. Their precarity is buried beneath myths, stereotypes, and denial. But the heartbreaking truth is that Black girls as young as 7 and women as old as 93 have been killed by the police. Explore a special zine issue highlighting the victims of police violence and an interactive webpage to learn more about the women that #SayHerName represents.

Jails have been described as the criminal justice system’s “front door,” but jail incarceration typically begins with the police, with an arrest. Before any bail hearing, pretrial detention, prosecution, or sentencing, there is contact with the police. But despite their crucial role in the process, we know less about these police encounters than other stages of the criminal justice system. This report analyzes gender and racial disparities in traffic and street stops, including arrests, searches, and use of force that occurs during stops.

Many of the worst features of mass incarceration — such as racial disparities in prisons — can be traced back to policing. Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) research on the policies that impact justice-involved and incarcerated people therefore often intersects with policing issues. Now, at a time when police practices, budgets, and roles in society are at the center of the national conversation about criminal justice, PPI has compiled key work related to policing (and discussions of other researchers’ work) in one briefing.